While
there are many aspects to what we do here at the Mackinac Center for Public
Policy, our fundamental goal is to use exhaustive and scholarly policy research to help people understand and practice the fundamentals of a free society. So it’s encouraging when we see a well-known writer,
David Mamet, explain how he was convinced of the importance and fundamental
goodness of free markets, which he explained recently in a wonderful essay in
the
Village Voice. It’s a refreshing point of view — he’s not trying to convince the reader of his ideas, he’s simply chronicling how his own perceptions changed.
For Mamet, this realization came when looking at the characters in his latest play:
The play, while being a laugh a minute, is,
when it’s at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between
the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The
conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a
living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of
the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market
economics) are less than those of government intervention.
Changing
your mind doesn’t happen all at one time, nor does it happen generally over
practical matters, but at a more basic level. As a fundamental starting point to
his political thought, Mamet began with the idea "that everything is always
wrong." Over further inspection, one thing came to his mind — that everything
wasn’t wrong. His views of people also changed — that they may be good, but are faced with corruption and faults as well:
One was of a state where everything was
magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other —
the world in which I actually functioned day to day — was made up of people,
most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along
with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the
freeway, even at the school-board meeting).
This
change in views also fostered respect for American government, the separation of powers in particular, which keeps vice geared towards power in check.
In
exploring that alternate viewpoint, he inspected some of the facets of his
politics, one being that there is a privileged class. What quashed that idea was
the realization that Americans are remarkably dynamic: "The rich and the
children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is
appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and the
individual may and probably will change status more than once within his
lifetime."
It’s not
likely that this change occurred in such neat progression. Mamet, after all,
claims to have been reading books by Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, Paul
Johnson and Shelby Steele. By examining his body of work, however, one may see
his beliefs in transition as early as 1997, when he released his film "The
Edge."
In "The
Edge" screenplay, which Mamet also directed, the lead character, Charles Morse
(played by Anthony Hopkins), defies Hollywood’s traditional representation of a
wealthy man by depicting him as intelligent and resourceful — the qualities that
enable him both to amass a fortune and survive being stranded in the Alaskan
wilderness. In almost any other Hollywood film, the wealthy man would be effete
and require saving by a salt-of-the-earth individual whose income and savings
are substantially less.
Contrast
this with the scene Mamet added for the 1992 James Foley-directed film version
of "Glengarry Glen Ross," which coincidentally also co-stars Alec Baldwin. In
this scene (found
here; please note that the language is extremely coarse), Baldwin depicts
the clichéd version of the successful businessman as a berating, bullying
tyrant. Although, no doubt, individuals such as Baldwin’s character actually
exist in the real business world, according to Hollywood there exists only that
type.
Readers
doubting whether Mamet’s free-market views are genuine or not may wish to refer
to a Jan. 10, 2008,
interview with him in "New York Magazine." In the article, Boris Kachka asks why Mamet would presumably lower himself to direct
television commercials for Ford Motor Company, to which he responds: "I
did it for the money. Why do you think I did it?" Kachka’s predictable follow-up is to question whether the playwright and director "needed the money that
badly." Mamet’s classic response? "Well, it’s nice to have, because you can buy
things with it."
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James M. Hohman is a
fiscal policy research assistant and Bruce Edward Walker is communications
manager for the Property Rights Network at the Mackinac Center for Public
Policy, a research and education institute headquartered in Midland, Mich.
Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the
authors and the Center are properly cited.
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